Paul G. Richards

Paul G. Richards (March, 1943—) is an English-born, American seismologist who has made fundamental contributions to the theory of seismic wave link propagation and in methods to understand how the recorded shapes of seismic waves are affected by processes of diffraction, attenuation and scattering. He is the Mellon Professor of the Natural Sciences at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University.

He was born in England and attended Cambridge University where he earned his Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) in Mathematics in 1965 and Caltech where he earned his Masters of Science (M.S.) in Geology in 1966 and his Doctorate of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in Geophysics in 1970. His thesis title was, "A contribution to the theory of high frequency elastic waves, with applications to the shadow boundary of the Earth's core." [1]

He co-authored with Keiiti Aki "Quantitative Seismology: theory and methods". He is the author of more than 130 peer-reviewed publications. He has an H-index of 21.[2] His most cited publications are Song and Richards (1996) (199 citations)[2] and Richards and Menke (1983) (169 citations).[2]